[Reader-list] What it was like to vote today: NY

[Paul D. Miller]

I got up at 5:30am (not the usual time for a late night DJ) to stroll over to my polling place on Greenwich with the expectation that at 6am there'd already be a huge line. Granted, it's an expensive neighborhood with the perks that go with living in this kind of area. Everything was smooth and I was in and out of the voting booth within 5minutes. Click, pull red lever, get out.

The people at the polling station were an American quilt - older white women (some who I know from my neighborhood primary were Hillary fanatics), and others who were African American, Jewish, Latino (no Asians!). It was a picture perfect morning: slightly overcast skies gave way to beautiful sunshine as the day progressed but I couldn't shake that weird feeling: I really have no idea if my ballot was counted. The public spaces of democracy in the U.S. - school cafeterias, gyms, churches, civic halls, state armories... are always the hallmark of what we think of as the transparent process of democracy in action, but the essentials - where the ballots are counted, always takes place in the grey realms of the backrooms of places most Americans never visit. Nevermind that even celebrities like Tim Robbins were purged from voting lists http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/tim-robbins-encounters-confusion-at-the-polls/ 

or strange stuff like Oprah Winfrey's use of an electronic voting machine that made her vote disappear:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/31/oprah-opts-for-early-voti_n_139869.html

I am tempted to actually think that the world as we know it functions in an obvious and transparent way: things work.

But it is only 6pm. I really can't say which direction it's all going, I can only say that I feel a strange sense of floating between times and centuries with this day. There's an eerie calm, like you're in the eye of a storm. Whichever way this election goes, the storm is waiting. That's all I can say at the moment.

Paul